This Ed Wood is dead wood.

After an agonizing first half-hour designed to empty the theater, Lynch unleashes his patented perfervid style, puts the familiar dwarfs and feebs on display and elicits a nicely horrifying turn from Lee. [7 Sept 1992]

One is left wondering why Williams has granted early retirement to his inner anarchist, what dark need compels a great clown to become a sad, fuzzy one in movies only Bob Dole - faking it -could love.

And now we have this ill wind, this feeble gust of an environmental horror story. The writer-director's disintegration from robust artistic health to narrative incoherence, from hitmaker to box-office loser, has an almost tragic trajectory. It's a saga worthy of being told by the young M. Night Shyamalan.

The only thing Schumacher and his scrupulous craftsfolk forgot to give the movie was life -- the energizing spirit of wit and passion that makes scenes work and characters breathe.

I Love You to Death lacks the precision, ferocity and guts needed for black farce.

The proceedings get so slow and saccharine that viewers will relishes the film's moments of redeeming idiocy. In one of them, Marlena whispers to Jacob, "Bring Rosie to my tent and don't tell anyone" - as if the roustabouts wouldn't notice a 12-ft.-tall, 10,000-lb. creature striding down the midway.

Director Fran Rubel Kuzui's frenzied mistrust of her material is almost total. Somebody should have given her a garlic necklace -- or a Miltown -- and told her to chill out.

Adrian Lyne, late of Flashdance, directed this silliness, and three writers watched their script fall victim to the death of a thousand cuts.

De Niro's performance begins to seem more a matter of well-practiced gestures than real conviction, and the long, silly finale more an exercise in empty panache by director Tony Scott than a truly gripping suspense piece involving people we care about. [26 August 1996, p.61]

In this climate, turning even a small corner of this century's central horror into feel-good popular entertainment is abhorrent.

Wyatt Earp drones past its logical conclusion, which is, of course, the great shoot-out. Since Earp's life uninstructively limped along after that event, so must the movie, further abusing our overtaxed patience and undertaxed intelligence.

Erin Brockovich is slick, grating and false. We bet it makes a bundle.

Dorothy encounters a pumpkin with stick limbs, a tin soldier and something called a Gump, which looks suspiciously like your basic moosehead. They are all mechanical marvels, not actors, which means they can do anything except win an audience's heart. Still, it would defy the gifts of an Olivier to find interesting, amusing life in a context as charmless and joyless (and songless) as the one Murch and his design team have concocted. [1 July 1985, p.63]

This is potentially near tragic material, and playing it as an all-forgiving comedy is a waste of everyone's time.

Valmont arrives stiffened by the elegant, inert formalism of Forman's direction, and chilled by Carriere's all too sober respect for his source and by their mutual determination to apply modern psychological understanding to the behavior of the principal figures.

A lot of it's real pretty, the colors and creatures and all, but these days, you know, every movie is pretty pretty. I guess the only thing that kept me glued to my seat was the gum somebody'd stuck on the upholstery. [16 July 1984, p.71]

In its wan attempt to be raunchy, the picture fails where Judd Apatow has usually succeeded; written by three women, this is a girl's mistaken idea of an R-rated comedy.

My pregnancy lasted 41 weeks and five days, involved morning, afternoon and night sickness and culminated in 25 hours of labor capped off by an emergency C-section. Yet all that seems like a walk in the park compared with the 100 minutes I spent watching Jennifer Lopez mug her way through The Back-Up Plan.

The Hangover Part III gives off such a stench of creative decay that it hardly seems possible that even Phillips or his co-writers have any use for the movie themselves. If a movie can be self-loathing and self-destructive, it’s this one.

Hopelessly overwrought and deeply dopey movie.

After sitting through this fractious fairy tale, we feel as plucked as a Christmas goose.

Phoenix is acting so hard you can feel the desperation throbbing in his veins. He leaves you wanting to start him a GoFundMe, so he won’t have to pour so much sweat into his job again. But the aggressive terribleness of his performance isn’t completely his fault.

At once smug and lazy, qualities fatal to comedy.

Our natural sympathy for the Carmichaels is sabotaged by crude and careless moviemaking.

The result is a flat, dumbly brutal movie, full of overplotted complexity and empty of all emotional resonance, except that provided by the presence of Jane Greer (the original film's dark lady, here doing a supporting role) and Richard Widmark.

Every ambitious picturemaker should be allowed one wild misfire at no lasting cost to his reputation. Crowe (Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous) can now put this aside and go back to making good films.

Despite Jackson's typically bravura turn, this Valentine massacre marks a step backward for the gifted director of Eve's Bayou.

Maybe it was fun to bathe in decadence back then. But this is no time to wallow in that mire.

Less a bad movie than simply not a movie, R.I.P.D. gives every indication of having been a sloppy first-draft script.

We're left with our stifled laughter and a very long movie.

It is likely to disappoint the book's acolytes and tax the patience of newcomers. [1 December 1997, p.84]

A ticket to Pretty Woman buys you mechanical titillation and predictable twists... Old-fashioned, assembly-line moviemaking without the old panache. [2 Apr 1990, p.70]

Occasionally curious moviegoers will discover an especially rotten specimen of the genus Cinema stinkibus... a work of ur-awfulness, counterbrilliance and antigenius. Your Highness, the new medieval-fantasy farce starring and co-written by Danny McBride, is such a movie.

Was Red Riding Hood masterminded by a cadre of particularly silly 11-year-olds undergoing withdrawal from Twilight? That's the only excuse for a movie this dopey.

Courteney Cox is good as a sexy, hard-pressed single mom, but she alone can't redeem the prevailing stupidity.

The movie veers uneasily from not-funny comedy to not-persuasive melodrama. Murphy forgets that the dialogue in old-fashioned crime pictures was as highly stylized as the settings. In place of sharply polished wisecracks, he gives us the steady mutter of the witless, unfelt obscenities that are the argot of our modern mean streets. [27 Nov 1989, p.88]

This eighth Madea movie is pretty lame even by Perry’s slapdash standards.

The bad news for everyone else is that the colorfully named characters from Clue remain flat enough to be stored in a box, and that all three endings are unpersuasive. [23 Dec 1985, p.79]

Few movies have spread their fibs or facts as clumsily as this one. There's not an emotionally plausible moment in the picture.

New Year's Eve may be the ugliest movie of the year, from the garish lighting to the heavy make up and bad costumes.

What must be said is that the new movie is simply awful: poorly structured, vulgarly written, insipidly directed, monotonously performed.

This movie could induce terminal boredom in adults and rot the minds of the young. [26 August 1985, p.64]

Suffice it to say that these morons have, quite simply, turned The Day the Earth Stood Still on its head and what's falling out of its pockets in that upended state is a stream of junk.

Worst-in-breed not only for this year, but very likely in living memory.

Director John Huston offers production numbers full of empty extravagance, a host of familiar characters (like Punjab and the Asp) with little to do - and a chorus of baby Mormans knowingly strutting their stuff, breaking the sound and charm barriers.

Coming to America seems to be more career move than movie. After the raucousness of Beverly Hills Cop II and the raunchiness of Eddie Murphy Raw, the star apparently wants to assert his claim on the currently vacant title of America's Sweetheart. His aspirations must be bigger and badder than that. We want -- may actually need -- something more from this gifted man than Eddie Murphy Tame. [4 July 1988 p.66]

Beverly Hills Cop III is just going through the motions, without comic conviction, surprises or suspense. [6 June 1994, p.66]

One of the worst messes in years.

Massively stupid: preposterous yet boring.

Conan is a sort of psychopathic Star Wars, stupid and stupefying.

An intellectual and a sensualist, Cronenberg graces Crash with philosophical musings, acres of pretty flesh and even more penis talk than on some 8 o'clock sitcoms. For all that, Crash doesn't work.

Judged purely by what director Walter Hill has put on the screen, Another 48 Hrs. is a movie mainly about the several pretty ways that glass shatters when bullets or bodies are propelled through it. [25 June 1990, p.77]

Director Joe Johnston's elaborately dressed kids' movie--about a board game that sucks its players into a perilous jungle overrun by lions, rhinos, monkeys, crocodiles and spiders--spends so much time on the how of special effects that it neglects the why of characterization.

If this retro crime comedy had been a Broadway play, it would have closed out of town.

Too many special effects, many of them stomach churning; too much pornographically arranged death.

Every character, every scene, is marred by the film's double view, which oscillates between sympathy and farce.

Surely the worst botch of a fantasy epic.

One of the worst movies I've ever seen.

In its eagerness not to condemn any political view, its points are so blurry that you have no idea what it’s trying to say. Its meaning, to the degree that it has one, just slides off the screen in a jellied mess.

What hurts the most is the wholehearted dedication each of these actors brings to such truly horrendous material: they make Life Itself almost watchable – almost –but there’s no effective cure for this kidney stone of a movie. Please, please, just let it pass.

It's a shame that W.E. smells so bad.

A stupefying shambles, Two of a Kind just noses out "Staying Alive" for Worst Picture of the Year.

One of the most execrable movies ever made. [6 March 1995, p.100]

Untraceable really is disgraceable. It's bad enough when a movie offers up atrocity scenes that would make the Nanking soldiers seem like Hannah Montana; it's repellent when the movie dresses up the sadism in a moral message that condemns the very weakness it is exploiting.

Wearying, stupefying, dumber than dumb, When Nature Calls would be a career ender for Carrey--except that a zillion people have seen it. Stop this, folks. It'll only encourage him.

The worst movie in living memory.

More than 24 hours has passed since I watched the new Adam Sandler movie Jack and Jill and I am still dead inside. It made me feel as if comedy itself were a dirty thing.

Every so often there comes a movie so tasteless, so nakedly pandering, so bodaciously ill conceived that you’ve got to see it to believe it. This year, that movie is Collateral Beauty.

Talk about off-casting: brittle-romantic Nora Ephron writing a high-concept comedy about a Mafioso's troubles when the Federal Witness Security Program plunks him down in white-bread suburbia; humorless Herbert Ross directing it; Steve Martin playing the gangster. Talk about miscalculation. [3 Sept 1990, p.72]

Obscene level of incompetence, excessive inanity in the story line, gross negligence of the viewer's intelligence, a prurient interest in the quick buck. [2 Oct 1995]